Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

He didn’t talk in any detail about what Camp Determination did, not even to Edith, not even if she’d been married to a guard at Camp Dependable in Louisiana before she said her I do’s with him. Nobody who didn’t wear the uniform needed to know the details. He felt a certain lonely pride in the knowledge of what he did to serve the Confederate States. He was part of the war, just as much as if he commanded a division of troops.

Edith didn’t ask for details, either. She just said, “All right,” and let it go at that.

When Jeff got back to Camp Determination, he summoned the camp’s chief engineer, a dour assault band leader-the Party equivalent of a major-named Lyle Schoonover, and told him what he needed. One of the reasons Schoonover was dour, and that he held a Party rank and not one in the regular Army, was that he’d lost his right leg below the knee. He heard Pinkard out, nodded, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“Not just the bathhouses, mind,” Jeff said. “Set something up where we can get rid of the records in a hurry, too.”

“I said I’d take care of it.” Schoonover sounded impatient. “I meant all of it.”

“You meant all of it…” Jefferson Pinkard tapped the three wreathed stars on the left side of his collar.

The engineer had only one star on each side of his collar, and no wreath. He gave Jeff a dirty look, but said what he had to say: “Sir.”

“That’s more like it,” Jeff said. “I’m in charge here, dammit, for better and for worse. Now that things don’t look so good, we’ve got to ride it out the best way we know how.”

Schoonover’s expression changed. There was respect on his narrow features now-reluctant respect, maybe, but respect all the same. Jeff smiled, down inside where it didn’t show. Educated people often started out looking down their noses at him. He hadn’t finished high school. Before he wound up running prison camps, he was a steelworker and a soldier of fortune. But he had a good eye for what needed doing. He’d always had it, and it let him get and stay ahead of a lot of people who thought they were more clever than he was.

“You’re not running from trouble, anyway-sir,” Schoonover said.

“Trouble’s like a dog. You run from it, it’ll chase you and bite you in the ass,” Pinkard said. A startled grunt of laughter escaped Schoonover. Jeff went on, “You go at it, though, sometimes you can make it run instead.”

“Wish we could make the damnyankees run,” the assault band leader said.

“That ain’t the point.” Educated or not, Jeff knew enough to say isn’t. He used ain’t with malice aforethought. “The damnyankees are the Army’s trouble. Them finding out about what all we’re doin’ here-that’s our trouble. That’s what we can take care of on our own.”

“Some of it, anyhow,” Schoonover said. “Those graves won’t disappear all by themselves.”

“Well, you’re right. I already figured that out myself, too,” Jeff said. “But since we can’t do anything about ’em, no point to flabbling about ’em, either. We got to take care of what we can take care of, that’s all.”

Lyle Schoonover got to his feet. He moved well, as long as he didn’t have to get anywhere in a tearing hurry. “Fair enough, sir. That’s a sensible attitude.” His salute didn’t seem too grudging. He left Pinkard’s office. If you didn’t know he’d been maimed in the Great War, his gait wouldn’t give it away.

He hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes before the telephone on Jeff’s desk jangled. Jeff picked it up. “Pinkard here.” He wondered what had gone wrong now. Telephone calls while he was at work were rarely good news.

“Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig.”

“What can I do for you, sir?” Jeff tried to stay cool. Calls from the Attorney General were never good news.

“You’ve got the damnyankees a little closer to you than we thought you might,” Koenig said.

“Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” Jeff began to suspect he knew why Koenig was calling. “We’re doing what we can to get ready, just in case.”

“Are you?” the Attorney General said. “Like what?”

With the conversation with the camp engineer fresh in his mind, Pinkard went into detail-maybe more detail than Ferdinand Koenig wanted to hear. He finished, “Nothin’ we can do about the graves, sir. Except for them, though, we can have this place looking like an ordinary concentration camp mighty quick.”

“All right,” Koenig said when he got done. The Attorney General sounded more that a little stunned. Yes, Jeff had told him more than he wanted to know. Serves you right, Jeff thought. After a moment to gather himself, Koenig continued, “Sounds like you’ve done everything you could.”

“You come up with anything else, sir, you just tell me, and I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard promised. He didn’t believe Koenig could. If he’d thought the man back in Richmond would have orders for him, he would have kept his mouth shut.

“I’ll do that.” By the Attorney General’s tone, he didn’t want to talk to anybody from Camp Determination for quite a while. That suited Jeff fine; he didn’t want to talk to Ferd Koenig, either. Koenig added, “I’ll tell the President how thorough you’ve been out there. He’ll be glad to have the good news.”

“Thank you kindly, sir.” Jeff might not be an educated man, but he could read between the lines. He heard what Koenig didn’t say: that Jake Featherston hadn’t had much good news lately. “Things aren’t going so good up in Yankeeland, are they?”

“They could be better.” By the Attorney General’s heavy sigh, they could be a lot better. Koenig went on, “But with any luck at all, the Army will do its job up there by Lubbock, and everything you’re doing will be like putting a storm cellar into a house-it’ll be nice to have, but you won’t really need it.”

“Here’s hoping, sir,” Pinkard said.

“Yeah, here’s hoping. Freedom!” Ferdinand Koenig hung up.

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed, but he was talking to a dead line. He put the handset back in its cradle. How much freedom could the CSA enjoy if the USA came down and took it away? The Negroes in his domain? Their freedom? They never entered his mind.

January in the North Atlantic was about as bad as it got. Waves threw the Josephus Daniels this way and that. The destroyer escort had a course she was supposed to follow. Keeping to it-keeping anywhere close to it-was a long way from easy. Even knowing exactly where the ship lay was a long way from easy.

Sam Carsten had only one thing going for him: he didn’t get seasick no matter what. Pat Cooley was a good sailor, but the exec looked a little green. A lot of the men seemed even less happy with their own insides than they had when they whipped the British auxiliary cruiser a couple of months earlier.

Cleaning crews with mops and buckets kept patrolling the heads and passageways. The faint reek of vomit persisted all the same. Too many sailors were too sick to hold in what they ate. More often than not, they couldn’t use the rail, either. To try would have asked to get washed overboard.

Waves and spray made the Y-ranging gear much less reliable than it would have been in better weather and calmer seas. Thad Walters looked up from his screens and put the best face on things he could: “Well, sir, the damn limeys’ll have just as much fun finding us as the other way round.”

“Oh, boy,” Sam said in hollow tones. “They’ll find Newfoundland. They’ll find the Maritimes. They’ll find trouble for the USA-find it or make it.”

“That’s the name of the game for them, sir,” Lieutenant Cooley said.